IX: October 29, 1865

IX

OCTOBER 29, 1865

I

EDEN LAY IN BED IN THE FAMILIAR ROOM AT WILLIAMSBURG where she had always slept with Sue. It was June now, but she had lost track of time, and anyway she didn’t care any more.

No one was really surprised when Eden collapsed the night of the fire in Richmond. She had gone beyond her strength so long that when at supper she said rather faintly that she would like to lie down a while Louise helped her into bed and bade her stay there, unless, of course, the fire got worse.

The troops had managed to check it short of Lee’s house, but not until nearly midnight could anyone be sure the city was safe.

Lying now in the big bed in the quiet room in Williamsburg, Eden was sometimes a little confused as to how she had got there—not that it mattered to her much. She remembered going to bed in Franklin Street with the roar of the fire only a few squares away—remembered the feel of the cool sheets under her shaking limbs and her own secret conviction that even if the house burned down she could not move, would not think it worth while to move to save herself. Later, Louise came back with a lamp, and tried to make her eat, but she only lay still with her eyes closed, shaking.

Louise felt her head and her wrist—there was no fever, but the thin pulse raced and the quick, shallow heartbeat set the ruffles of her nightdress visibly atremble. Louise was frightened and made her drink some hot milk.

They couldn’t find Dr. Tracy and they had no idea how to get hold of Cabot, who had vanished into the blazing maelstrom beyond the Square. She heard them speak his name and prayed helplessly, lying motionless except for the trembling she could not control—no, no, not Cabot—don’t let them—don’t bring Cabot here—don’t let me have to see Cabot—

But she had no words to tell them, and in the morning Louise bent over her again.

“Eden—Major Murray is here. He wants to bring a Yankee doctor he believes in—will you see him?”

“No.”

“But we can’t find Dr. Tracy, honey, he’s been out all night long trying to help everybody at once. Won’t you see Major Murray’s man instead?”

“No. Tell Cabot—go away.” And the effort for speech left her limp and sweating.

“Would you see Dr. Tracy if we can find him?”

There was no answer. Louise retreated to where Cabot was standing at the bottom of the stairs.

“Very well, then, we’ll find this man Tracy,” said Cabot, and somehow within an hour he did and brought back with him the kindly, white-haired man who had saved Lafe and tried to save Felicity, and who had tended Dabney the best he could.

Inert under Dr. Tracy’s hands, Eden never knew that in the little sitting-room where Cabot waited Charlotte couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Major Murray, I might as well tell you first as last,” Charlotte began with an uneasy glance at Dabney, who always said she talked too much,

“and it’s nothing Dr. Tracy can cure—at least, she’s worn herself out with work and worry, sure enough, but that’s not the real trouble, you see, she got sorry for my brother Grafton and said she’d marry him, and now she knows she was wrong—at least, I can see she was wrong, on account of you, and she doesn’t know what to do because she promised Grafton, and that’s what’s killing her, and you may as well know!”

Cabot looked first at Dabney as though expecting him to contradict so preposterous a story, and then turned to Charlotte slowly as though it hurt his head to move it.

“Where is your brother Grafton now?” he asked, with an effort.

“He’s gone back to the line. Are they still fighting?”

“Yes. They’re still fighting.”

“He—Grafton has loved her all his life,” Charlotte pleaded apologetically. “He’s never so much as looked at another girl. Reckon he just sort of—wore her down, finally. But it wasn’t his fault to love her—

there’s nobody like Eden, you know that yourself—Grafton wouldn’t try to

—I mean, you mustn’t hold it against him!”

Cabot’s drawn face twisted into a wry smile, and again his eyes sought Dabney’s.

“I’m not blaming him,” he said gently. “I’m sorry for him too. Because Grafton will have to let her go.”

The doctor came back then, looking puzzled and unhappy.

“It’s a form of exhaustion,” he said, seeming to feel his way. “Terrible lassitude and prostration. But worst of all—she doesn’t seem to care.”

“Tell me what you need for her,” said Cabot, and the muscles round his jaw were tight. “Write out everything that might be of any use to her, and I’ll get it from our hospital stores at once.”

The doctor made a modest list—he didn’t really know what to do—

suggested wine and tea and warm food as well, and went away, still looking doubtful and distressed, with Cabot looming beside him.

Dimly while she lay there in Franklin Street, she had been aware of Cabot’s powerful hand in her affairs. Medicines, succulent bits of fresh meat such as hadn’t been seen in Richmond for years, broths, fruit, wines, sweets—she turned from them all, indifferently, to lie very still with her eyes closed and listen to her own heart, which seemed to have loosed its moorings entirely to flutter somewhere in mid-air. Days slid by. She knew that Cabot must be there, somewhere, but relied on Louise to preserve her from seeing him. At least she would not have to see Grafton so long as the Yankees held Richmond. She didn’t know which would be worse—to see Cabot or to see Grafton. But it was Grafton’s right to see her now when he chose—when he could, anyway. She had promised Grafton—and by then her whole world would be a panic of wild heartbeat and cold perspiration and she would make a defensive blank of her mind again, lying very still….

Finally it was Sunday once more in Franklin Street, and the church bells rang, and that was the day Louise came to tell her that Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. “They’ll be coming home now at last,” Louise said, with tears running down her cheeks. “They were starving at Appomattox—

dropping in their tracks by the road—Grant was very generous, he fed them from his own men’s rations, and they can keep their horses and side-arms, and their transportation home is free—some of them are coming into Richmond already—”

Grafton. Grafton would be coming home. Lie very still…. Don’t think at all…. Not yet….

And so Eden was not at the window with Charlotte when the muddy caisson drew up at the curb bearing the long, rough plank coffin with the bullet-torn banner laid over it. Grafton had come home, killed on that last Sunday morning when the battle flared near Appomattox before the white flags began passing to and fro.

Tears crept out from the corners of Eden’s closed eyes when they told her, and soaked into the pillow—endless, hopeless tears for Grafton, who had won after all. But it did begin to be surprising when after a few days she still got no stronger and the tears would not stop. It was not, said Charlotte frankly, as though she had ever been really in love with poor Grafton, she was only sorry for him. Dr. Tracy shook his head and muttered that dreaded word decline, and Cabot, who called every day and sat patiently in the parlour talking to Louise or Charlotte, made a rather sudden decision for them. Cabot got the best ambulance there was to be had in his army, and Eden was put into it and taken out of Richmond to Williamsburg.

She remembered very little of the journey. And now here she was, home again, lying quite still lest she think about things she had comfortably forgotten, things it was no use thinking about any more, and besides—if she was very careful not to think at all her heart was back in the groove again and gave no trouble….

She roused to find Gran sitting in the big chair by the bedside where Sue spent so much of her time. Even now, one was always glad to see Gran.

Eden smiled faintly and turned her head on the pillow as a gesture of welcome.

“Hullo, Gran,” she whispered.

Gran never asked how one was, nor chirped about feeling better today, nor any of the sickroom inanities so many otherwise sensible people gave way to. Gran knew by looking, how one was.

She raised one hand now and pointed to the bedside table, where the most glorious bowl of roses sat, shedding fragrance. Eden turned her head still farther, to see, and sniffed appreciatively.

“Aren’t they lovely,” she whispered.

“Your favourite bush,” said Gran. “Down by the arbour. It’s blooming itself inside out for you this year.”

“That’s nice of it.” She lay a moment looking into Gran’s calm, sweet eyes, which looked back at her, unselfconscious as a child’s.

“I’m taking Sue’s place,” said Gran, “because she has a visitor.

Something she’s been looking forward to. Cabot’s sister, Melicent, has come to stay with us a while.”

“N-not Cabot—?” Eden murmured, and seemed to shrink smaller into the pillows.

“He brought her here, but—”

“No—no, it’s no use, Gran, I’m—too ill to see anyone.”

“You won’t have to see him. He started back to Washington an hour ago.”

“Oh.” Eden thought this over, for it seemed rather odd. And yet, after all, not even Cabot would come tramping into one’s bedroom demanding an interview when one was so ill. And he had left Melicent there. He would be back.

Gran watched her with a gleam of satisfaction while she thought it over.

Gran could see that she had not expected him to be gone like that. Gran knew now that she had been right to insist that Eden must not be allowed even the chance to refuse to see him. It was Gran’s idea that he should go before Eden ever knew he was there.

Once more their eyes met, and Eden’s were clouded.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I—” she began.

“I did. But he told me what it was.”

“Told you that he—?”

“That he had been a spy, yes. Working between the lines since before Sharpsburg.”

“I never meant anyone to know,” Eden said, fighting tears. “Not even you. I didn’t want you all to hate him.”

“Well, you see,” said Gran, “I can remember how we felt about Nathan Hale. We thought him quite a hero.”

“But he—”

“He was a spy. And he was caught and hanged. Of course, he was on our side. But then there was Major André. We thought rather well of him, too, even though he was a redcoat. It’s no job for a coward—spying.”

“Did you say that—to him?”

“There was no need. You’ve talked enough now for a while, I think.

Better try and take another nap.”

Eden subsided obediently, but not to sleep. He had told Gran he was a spy. Wasn’t he afraid of anything? Surely not even Cabot had had a right to expect her to take it the way she had. But he had faced up to it, the first chance he got, and Gran hadn’t turned against him. Except for herself, he was still welcome here. Except for herself….

“Did—does anyone else know?” she whispered.

“I didn’t see fit to mention it at the dinner table, if that’s what you mean.”

Silence again, in the drowsy afternoon heat, sweet with roses. No one else knew. Dabney had offered Cabot his hand, that day in Richmond. Sue was friends with Melicent. The war was over. If only she wasn’t so tired—

But something had happened to the hard little ball of misery which had knotted up her inside for so long. It relaxed with a slow sigh, and she fell asleep.

II

Melicent was going about in a daze of happiness.

No day was long enough to contain her delight in this new existence which stretched before her like the Elysian Fields, sunlit and laughing and full of pleasant surprises. She did not know Williamsburg well enough to notice as its homecoming residents did at every turn the added shabbiness and emptiness the war had wrought, nor to miss the faces which would never be seen in its streets again. It had been a backwater behind the lines so long that it bore no recent scars of the fighting it had seen, and its inhabitants had not starved and suffered as the people in Sherman’s path had done, nor known the strain undergone by those who had lived in the comparative safety of Richmond. It was summer and the gardens still bloomed and the darkies still sang, and there seemed always to be enough to eat in Ransom’s white house at the edge of town. And in spite of the scarifying sense of defeat which lay heavy on every Southern heart, there was a kind of stealthy relief too, in places like Williamsburg—for the fighting was over, and surely nothing which was to come could be worse than that; the men that survived had come home and there were tearful, longed-for reunions, and hence a kind of happiness, even when body and spirit were damaged beyond repair. It was over. They had been beaten, they

had lost beyond all calculation of love and comforts and dear accustomed ways, lost more than they could yet realize of all they held dearest—but the guns were silent at last, and those families that were left closed ranks and clung fast to what they still had, and drew breath against whatever lay ahead. It was over….

Melicent had never lived among a large family before, and for her the continual to and fro between Ransom’s house and the Sprague place in England Street and the Crabb house where Dabney and Charlotte had come to live was a sort of perpetual party. In no time at all Sue and Myrta were like sisters to her, and her shyness of Fauquier soon wore off under his casual friendliness. She was given Dabney’s old room for her own, and this fact, along with his crutch, made her particularly fond of him. When she learned that it was also the room in which Sedgwick had recovered from his wound after the battle of Williamsburg she had to go up and look at it all over again, with new eyes.

Sedgwick, through no effort of his own, was her favourite of them all.

He took no particular notice of her, not as much as Fauquier did; in fact, she saw comparatively little of him, and of course knew nothing of what lay between him and Sue. He had gone back to his reading for Law, and he took solitary rides on the little mare, Jingle, who had somehow endured hard use, bad weather, and scant rations to carry her master home again when the war ended, though his war-horse, Sycamore, was in such poor shape he had to be led—they were short, gentle rides, for Jingle’s sake.

Both Lafe and Sedgwick had thankfully shed the threadbare grey uniforms they wore away from Appomattox for the ruffled shirts, black stocks, bright waistcoats, skirted coats, and light trousers they had worn before the war and they left their hair longer than the men up North. Tall and straight and slender men, oddly alike now that Sedgwick had come to maturity in the hard school of war and Lafe’s perennial youthfulness was returning with rest and better food—oddly alike in their laughter, fresh and ready, in their soft Virginia speech and gentle ways with women—alike, too, in something in their make-up which was noticeably shining and resilient. War had not blunted or even sobered the Spragues, it had only tempered them. They were different from anything Melicent had ever seen before, and she was inclined to gaze at them silently from a respectful distance while they, assuming that she was merely shy, refrained from

singling her out for any special overtures till she had had time to feel less strange among them.

Louise was mother to both households now that there was no longer a Felicity. Sally, to everyone’s surprise, had suddenly married a rather middle-aged colonel and remained in Richmond as mistress of his Franklin Street mansion. Sue was doing her best to run Ransom’s house as her mother had done, and at the same time be nurse to Eden. She slept on a cot in the room she and Eden had always shared, but after Melicent’s arrival Eden saw less of Sue and more of Mammy. No one ever suggested that she should see Melicent, and at last curiosity stirred.

“Is she pretty, Mammy?” she inquired one day over her supper tray, after being urged to drink up a glass of the special wine their visitor had brought as a gift to the invalid.

“Pretty as can be,” said Mammy promptly. “But her ma ain’ got what I’d call taste. Mm- mm, her po’ little clothes is fit to break yo’ heart.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Plain, an’ dark, an’ ugly—ain’ fit fer nobody under forty-five an’ a ol’

maid at that! Honest, Miss Eden, I’m sorry fer dat po’ chile ’bout her clothes! You an’ Miss Sue ain’ nebber seen de like in all yo’ born days!”

“Well, we’d better ask her brother to send her something suitable from Washington.”

“Somebody sho’ better—cain’ get nothin’ yere nowadays.”

Sue looked round the door just then and came in.

“Did you think I had deserted you, Dee? Melicent and I were over at Aunt Louise’s and we stayed to supper.”

“I’m glad Melicent is here, I must have been rather dull company since I got home,” Eden said. “Sue, Mammy’s been telling me the poor girl’s clothes are all wrong.”

“They are.” Sue came in and closed the door behind her. “I don’t like to say anything to her, but she hasn’t got enough thin dresses for this climate, and I’ve nothing fit to lend her!”

“We’ll have to tell Cabot. He’ll send her something.”

Sue frankly stared. Eden had taken no interest whatever in anything for weeks and now here she was, eating supper without being coaxed and giving advice about clothes.

“You mean— write to Cabot?” Sue asked stupidly.

“Gran could do it. He’ll never think of it unless he’s told, but he could easily send down a couple of dresses from Washington, there must be plenty of them there.”

“W-would you like to see her some time?” Sue asked cautiously, wondering if this was the opening they had been waiting for.

“Yes, I would. Maybe tomorrow.”

Sue could hardly wait to get away and tell Gran.

When Melicent entered the room the next day Eden was propped up against the pillows looking frail but very much alive. Melicent thought she had never seen anyone so beautiful, and couldn’t imagine how Cabot could bear to stay in Washington.

Melicent was wearing a dark green, watered silk dress with an unbecoming high neck and bulky sleeves. It was obviously new and expensive, and anything but suitable to a Virginia summer. Eden understood Mammy’s horrors over the first Yankee wardrobe she had ever seen. Before the war there would have been plenty of their own thin lawns and embroidered muslins to lend her, but now everything they had was worn to shreds.

“If I were you I’d ask Cabot to send me some cooler dresses,” Eden remarked soon after Melicent had settled herself in the armchair and was gazing at her with round, admiring eyes. “No one knows how hot it is here in July till they have felt it, so you naturally didn’t come prepared.”

“Well, I—thought he might send something,” Melicent said uncertainly.

“Because on the train coming down he suddenly seemed to catch sight of me as though I hadn’t been there all along, and he said—you know how he is—he said, ‘Oh, God, your clothes! I forgot all about them!’ And when I told him I had three new dresses—this is one of them—he said, ‘What good will that do!’ and muttered something about getting hold of Mrs. Trimble right away. She is the Senator’s wife who chose my clothes that time I was in Washington, and so I thought—”

“Maybe something is on the way, then,” Eden suggested.

“Unless he forgot,” said Melicent, resigned to the possibility.

“Was that you I heard singing yesterday?”

“I hope it didn’t disturb you—Sue asked me to, and I tried to hold in so you wouldn’t hear—”

“I wanted to hear, it sounded like an angel,” said Eden. “An angel very far away. Next time I’ll have my door open and you sing as loud as you can.”

“I learned all that music you sent me once, thank you very much.”

“Oh, yes—so long ago,” said Eden, looking back.

“I sang The Last Waltz at the Senator’s house in Washington—they liked it.”

“I’d almost forgotten The Last Waltz— I’d like to hear it again.”

“Shall I go and do it for you now?”

But before she could rise from the chair, Sue whirled into the room carrying a band-box in each hand.

“Melicent, there are bales of boxes arriving for you from Washington—

somebody has sent you a whole trousseau!”

“Cabot! He didn’t forget!” cried Melicent, shining with pride of him.

“Bonnets?” said Eden, eyeing the band-boxes, and she actually sat up away from the pillows. “Oh, let me see the bonnets! Do open them, Melicent!”

“Here?” asked Melicent doubtfully, for they had told her Eden tired very easily and no one was allowed to stay long.

“Yes, of course here!” Eden patted the coverlet impatiently. “I haven’t seen a new bonnet in years!”

Pharaoh paused at the open door, his arms piled high with parcels adorned with a famous silver label and tied with bright red cord.

“Whereat you want all dese yere boxes?” he inquired. “All got Miss Melicent’s name writ on ’em.”

“Bring them in here—all of them,” Eden commanded. “Do you mind, Melicent? Do you mind showing me the things as you unpack them?”

So Mammy was sent for and soon the room was aswirl with tissue paper and delighted exclamations. Cabot was not so thoughtless as to send his sister new clothes in a household where there had been no new clothes for four years, without remembering the rest of them. He had actually sent them each a summer dress, chosen by the Senator’s wife and labelled with their names—and for Gran, an embroidered Chinese shawl and the most frivolous of lace caps.

Dinner was late while they admired themselves, the girls fastening each other up if Mammy was not quick enough, discussing every detail of the

exquisite work and the small alterations necessary to a perfect fit, while Eden lay and watched, with her hand on the pink foulard peignoir which was her gift, and which had been laid across the bed within her reach.

“Clothes,” said Gran, nodding, when she heard that Eden had sat right up and asked for the bonnets. “That’s a good sign.” And that night she wrote Cabot a letter which made him feel roughly a hundred years younger.

Melicent was wearing her new dress, which had a white organdie guimpe and big bell sleeves gathered into wrist-bands made of little crystal bead bracelets, when she sat down to the piano that afternoon in the drawing room to sing for Eden, whose door was open upstairs. Sue sat on the sofa across the room in her new white muslin and green sash, sewing a fresh lace collar into an old lawn dress for second best—but it was less discouraging to make over old clothes if you had one perfect outfit which only had to be kept nice by wearing others when it didn’t matter.

They didn’t hear Sedgwick come in through the hall, and he stood a minute on the threshold listening while Melicent’s young voice soared through the sentimental strains of The Long Long Weary Day. As she came to the refrain he moved on into the room and with a mirthful glance at Sue added his own voice, so highly thought of by General Stuart and so derided by his loving family, to Melicent’s. When they finished, and he struck his famous high note, he was leaning on the piano beside her and she was round-eyed and breathless, almost too surprised to keep up with him.

“That’s a Southern song, honey,” he said then in his gentle drawl. “Who taught you that one?”

“I have an album of Southern songs,” she explained diffidently. “I got it some time ago because—because—”

“Because you thought it might come in handy some day?” He was smiling down at her, so gracefully at his ease, his dark-fringed grey eyes looking so kindly at her flushed, upturned face.

She dropped her gaze to the keyboard, and played a few sweet, aimless chords.

“I didn’t know you sang,” she got out, and he laughed, the free Sprague laughter which had survived the war.

“I don’t,” he said. “It’s what we call nigger tenor down here. I was just born with it. Ask Sue if I can sing!”

“Of course you can sing, Sedgie,” Sue said at once, as though he was very young, and her dimple showed.

“Let’s sing another,” Melicent implored him, and her fingers stirred on the keys. And obligingly he began to teach her Lorena by rote, reaching sometimes to strike a chord himself, for he played by ear, so that their hands brushed and Melicent became aware of the somehow stinging vitality in the slim body bent above her. Her fingers stumbled and were stupid beside his, and music was not all she heard in his voice as it sang the sad, foolish words of the song.

And Sue, playing at duenna on the sofa, felt hot tears behind her eyelids, because this was how it would come some time and she must make up her mind to it. Anyone could see that Melicent had begun to love him as she herself had loved him at sixteen, with a wild, blind, unstinting devotion.

And some time Sedgwick must take what he could and build the life they could not have together, so he needn’t grow old alone and lacking and robbed as she had dreaded that he might.

Perhaps Melicent was the one, Sue thought. Perhaps it had come already and she must give him up all over again now that she had just got him back safe from the war. Some one had to look after him, because she could never do it herself the way they wanted. He had never once referred to that day on the riverbank, but she knew that nothing which had happened to him since had made him forget—she knew by his eyes and the tone of his voice when he spoke to her that his memory of it was as vivid as hers. He had warned her the next morning that it must be as though that day had never happened, and he kept his word. But it would never be quite the same, she knew, with something forever withheld, and guarded, and denied. The least she could do was to play up to that, and be just cousins, as he said, and never to think beyond. The least she could do was to help him all she could, by pretending to forget it too. Perhaps it would be easier if his life was filled in as it should be, perhaps the sooner he married some one else the better. And in that case, Melicent was the one. Sue felt she could bear Melicent in Sedgwick’s life, because Melicent loved her too, and Melicent was lonely and rather forlorn and liked being in Williamsburg and ought never to have to go back to that dreadful place in Trenton….

Sue stole a glance towards the piano, blinking away the blur. He was having a good time with Melicent. His face was relaxed and smiling, with

that tight look gone from round his jaw which she so often saw there when a silence fell between them. His shoulder touched Melicent’s crisp organdie, their hands moved together on the keyboard, their voices blended, and Melicent was watching his lips for the words, with a pathetic upward lift to her long lashes. Rebellion shot through Susannah like a pain and receded slowly into what she called commonsense. Poor Melicent adored him. Poor Melicent—was going to marry him. It would be best that way—easiest for everybody, if only Sedgwick could be made to see that it would be selfish and wicked to set up a headstone on Melicent’s life because double first cousins couldn’t marry. Melicent at least could be happy, and Sedgwick—

Sedgwick could have his children.

When Lorena had been successfully sung from beginning to end and Melicent ran upstairs to Eden to be congratulated, Sedgwick came and sat down near the sofa and heard all about the new dresses from Washington.

“When is Cabot coming back?” he inquired then. “Eden is getting better every day—what’s the matter with them, anyway?”

“I don’t know. There was something besides Grafton, I’m sure, or the fact that the Yankees won the war. Gran knows, I think. Probably she’ll send for him when she thinks Eden is well enough.”

“She’d better. Then Eden would be provided for. The Murrays didn’t lose money in the war, you can bet, if they own a steel mill! Eden had better grab him, and I’d tell her so myself.”

“Sedgie, what a thing to say! As though Eden would marry for money!”

“Eden can marry Cabot Murray for love, we all know that. Since he’s got money too, so much the better! Nobody down here will ever have any again!”

“But once Father gets the school going again, and you take your Law exams—”

He shook his head.

“We’re finished, Sue. We’re all gone to pieces. Nobody can afford the school as it used to be, and nobody can pay lawyer’s fees any more. And with Farthingale gone, we haven’t even got anything to sell.”

“Isn’t there anything left of it, after the fire?”

“The chimneys. And part of the kitchen and the quarters. And a lot of charred wood and bits of glass and china, and the stair rail.”

“Do you think Butler burned it on purpose?”

“He wouldn’t have to. Lots of houses caught fire just from being fought over, or being too close to the cook fires. It wouldn’t have to be pure Yankee spite. I’d rather think it wasn’t. But even though we never really lived there since I can remember, I hate to think of the house being gone.

The Spragues have always had Farthingale, ever since Grandfather St. John married money in his day! I miss having it. So does Father.”

There was a silence. Sue was thinking. She was thinking how rich the Murrays must be.

“Sedgie, what are we going to do about Melicent?”

“Do about her?”

“She oughtn’t to have to go back to Trenton.”

“She doesn’t have to, does she? Her father doesn’t seem to be the kind to care whether she’s there or not.”

“Sedgie. Why don’t you marry her?”

“What? ” He sat staring at her.

“Now, don’t yell at me, Sedgie, it’s not such a crazy idea.”

“It’s the craziest one I ever heard of!” he said, his voice still raised in bewilderment. “Are you out of your mind, Susannah?”

“You like her, don’t you?”

“Well; yes, of course, but—”

“She’s in love with you.”

Her head was bent above her needle, he could not see her face, but he knew in a sweeping revelation how her thoughts were running. Once she had ridden down to the river at Jamestown, for what she conceived to be his good. And now, as on that morning, he was silent, suppressing his own emotion until he could achieve calmness for her sake.

“I’m not one of your book heroes,” he said at last. “You can’t just marry me off with a stroke of your pen, I can talk back to you!”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

But he could not take her in his arms and kiss away the tears that dripped down, bright as the needle in her fingers, while the silence stretched between them. He rose with an angry, lithe movement like his father’s, and went to stand at the window behind her, staring out into the garden. At last he spoke, and his voice was low and even.

“I’d better send Micah over here to clean out those roses,” he said. “He’s got our place looking pretty tidy now.”

“If I were your sister, Sedgie—Melicent is the one I’d choose for you.”

“You’re not my sister, honey,” he reminded her tonelessly from the window. “What’s the matter with that cape jessamine? Something is eating the leaves.”

“Yes, I know—I couldn’t see anything on it, maybe soapsuds would help. Sedgie—please think about Melicent, won’t you? We can’t go on like this till we’re old—it hurts too much—”

“It will be easier when we’re old—according to what they say.”

“You can’t do it. I won’t let you. It’s not fair to her either.”

“Oh, nonsense, Sue, she hardly knows me! You’re just imagining that part of it.”

“But I’m not. I can tell by looking at her, and she keeps asking about you—just little things—at first I thought it was just the way a girl would feel about any soldier like you, but—now I know. I know how she feels.”

“Well, Lordy, Susannah, why did you have to go and tell me?” His flexible, revealing voice was almost querulous with embarrassment. “I don’t want anything to do with it, it makes me feel like a fool, and now I won’t know where to look!”

“Look at Melicent, Sedgie. She’s lovely.”

“No, I’m damned if I will! It doesn’t make sense for you, of all people, to try and railroad me into marrying a mere child—”

“She’s sixteen. When I was sixteen—”

“Now, stop it, Sue. Stop it.” With another of his restless, quick movements he returned to his chair and stood with his hands on the back of it, looking down at her. His knuckles were white. “I bet you’re just after more of the Murrays’ money,” he accused, trying to tease her out of it.

But Sue raised her head and met his eyes steadfastly and said, “I want you to marry her, Sedgie, for all our sakes.”

“I can’t,” he said, looking back at her, the chair between them. “Don’t you understand—I can’t.”

Somebody ran down the stairs and Melicent’s voice came from the doorway—“Gran wants to see Sedgwick before he leaves.”

“Yes—I was just going up,” he said quickly and was gone, without another word to either of them.

Gran saw the trouble in his face before he reached her chair and bent to receive her kiss. It came out at once.

“Gran, you’ll have to talk to Sue. She’s taken it into her head that I ought to marry Melicent.”

Instead of laughing it off, or indignantly lining up on his side, she only looked at him thoughtfully.

“It had occurred to me too,” she said.

“Is this a conspiracy?” he demanded.

“Sue is twenty, and I’m nearly a hundred—and we’ve both of us thought it out the same way. Sometimes people have to make do with second best, and go on living.”

“That’s easy to say!” he cried. “Especially when you yourself have had the best!”

“I was thinking of your great-grandmother Dorothea,” she murmured.

“The one who married the Frenchman.”

“Yes. You see—it was Julian she loved.”

“But he chose you. It wasn’t quite the same thing.”

“Not quite. But they were very happy, and I’m sure Armand never dreamed he was second choice.”

“I never thought you’d go back on me, Gran!”

She reached out a frail, compelling hand, so that he had to come and take it in both his. The line of his lips was white and hard. Softly from below came the sound of the piano and Melicent’s voice repeating the lesson he had taught her—

“The years creep slowly by, Lorena,

The snow is on the grass again,

The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena,

The frost gleams where the flow’rs have been….”

Sedgwick dropped down on the stool at his grandmother’s feet, and hid his face in her lap.

III

It seemed to Gran that almost before her letter could have reached Washington Cabot was striding into her room at Williamsburg, crushing her

hands in his, his eyes searching her face for encouragement in his belief that he was not too soon, that Eden would see him now, at last.

“You must have flown,” she said, making no effort not to look pleased.

“I’ve waited five years,” he reminded her. “What must I say to her now?

Tell me what to do, when I see her.”

“Since when have you needed help with your courting, Cabot?”

“I’ve never been on my knees to a woman yet,” he said wryly. “But down I go, if she wants it that way!”

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Gran, thinking of Archer Crabb and how tiresome it was, really, to have to sit on a pedestal when what you wanted was love.”

“Gran, I’ve got stage-fright,” he confessed. “It’s worse than a cavalry charge, walking up to her now and—well, what do I have to do, apologize because we won the war?”

“I’d forget about the war if I were you.”

“Has she forgotten?”

“Not yet. But we all will, in time.”

“I’m afraid that’s going to be hard to do, Gran. Things are pretty bad down here.”

“Yes,” she nodded. “I remember. And we had George Washington.”

“And we’ve lost Lincoln. Gran, promise me something, regardless of Eden, if either of us can think that way a minute. Promise me, no matter what happens you will let me know if—if I can do anything—for anybody

—to help out. I know your grandson and the boys would die before they’d turn to me now—but you know better than that—don’t you, Gran?”

For a moment, deeply touched, she sat holding to his strong hands, savouring an illusive comfort. Then she patted his fingers reassuringly and said, “Ring the bell, my dear, and we’ll ask Sue if you can see Eden now.”

Eden was sitting in the big chair by the window of her room when Sue came to tell her Cabot was in the house. It took her by surprise. She was wearing the flowered peignoir he had sent from Washington, and her hair was in two loose braids on her shoulder. The late afternoon sun had nearly passed the window and shone obliquely into the room, cooling towards evening. There was the scent of roses.

“He’s with Gran now,” Sue said. “Wouldn’t you like to see him a few minutes before supper?”

“L-like this?” asked Eden faintly.

“Yes, of course, you look very nice,” said Sue, and took silence for assent, and went away to tell Cabot he might go in.

He came slowly across the threshold, and as Eden sat looking up at him from the chair she remembered how once she had thought if only he could be tamed and softened—The arrogance was gone from him now, and the mockery, and his eyes were anxious, for she looked very thin and frail, and he was long past taking anything for granted.

“Cabot, I—have so much to thank you for,” she said, and held out her hand to him.

He stood holding it and looking down at her.

“Anybody could see you had to get out of Richmond. I’m glad I was able to arrange it,” he heard himself saying, and wondered how he could sound so collected when there was a hammer pounding crazily inside his chest and the strangling need to lift her up and hold her forever was gripping his throat. He would never believe she was still alive and safe and getting well until he had her in his arms again. The nightmare that he had lost her would never end until once more he felt her lips, artless and yielding, under his. Her hair was so long—her neck was so small and white

—her body without the hooped skirt was so pathetically slim, she would be so light and little in his arms. “You look better than you did the last time I saw you,” he heard himself saying foolishly.

“I don’t remember much about that.”

“I’d like to forget it myself. This is much pleasanter.”

“It was very brave of you to tell Gran about—about—”

“Good Lord, you don’t think I could go round with that on my soul and her not knowing!”

“I was afraid to tell her,” she admitted.

“You’ve lived with her all your life and you don’t know her as well as I do!”

“Apparently not.” Her hand was still in his and the old familiar singing of her blood had begun again. She endured it dizzily, longing for the moment when she could lean against the bulwark of his shoulder, wishing that he would simply stoop and gather her up into the crushing strength which was to her both terror and sanctuary. At the same time she felt a flicker of inward laughter—was it possible that for once he was afraid? It

looked as though Cabot the conqueror did not quite dare to claim her. But one could not just say to him out of the blue, Take me, idiot, you don’t have to talk—Her head was going round with weakness and excitement. If she fainted into his arms would he, she wondered, yell for help? Gran would have known what to do with him. Gran would have known how to show him that she was dying to be kissed again—“You must have wished more than once that I was as wise as Gran,” she murmured wistfully.

“It will come,” he promised, smiling. “If you live long enough.”

“She has made up her mind to have her birthday party again this autumn.”

“She will, too. You see if she doesn’t!”

“Shall you be here, Cabot?”

“Shall I?” he asked gently, and felt her other hand laid on his, and saw that his ring was on her finger.

IV

It was Tibby Day’s hundredth birthday, and the party had gone off very well indeed, almost like old times.

Towards midnight, she lay in the big bed waiting for some one to come and see if she wanted anything more and put out the light, because she didn’t. She had had her Madeira and her biscuit, and everyone had been in to say Good-night to her, and now the house was settling down, a house quite pleasantly full again.

She counted them over contentedly: Ransom, lonely and patient, without poor Felicity, but getting his school together again with Dabney to help him

—it looked as though Dabney might be the next schoolmaster instead of Fauquier, who wanted to go into Law in partnership with Sedgwick and Lafe; Sue had sold her first novel to Harper’ s and had money of her own, and a future as an authoress; Myrta, passing through the romantic stage, was still not her favourite grandchild; (Barry would have been nearly nineteen now if he hadn’t been killed at New Market in the Valley—she would never know how Julian might have looked at nineteen, two years before she ever saw him;) Eden and Cabot were back from their Washington honeymoon for the party, and would be off again next week to start furnishing their house there—remarkable how fast Eden had got well,

once she put her mind on it, though Cabot still treated her as though she might break. Eden was happy, anyone could tell, and there would always be enough money, Cabot would see to that. There wasn’t enough money in the South any more, and Sedgwick would be poor until he got his start, anyway

—but Melicent wouldn’t mind that, not the way she looked at him, till it brought your heart up in your throat. Perhaps something would turn up for Sue by and by—something besides writing books, though goodness knows that seemed to keep her busy and happy enough….

If only Julian could have seen them all at supper to-night —she drifted, dreaming of Julian in his youth—one didn’t want to live forever—one left too much behind, till finally one only wanted to get back to all that was gone. She always thought of it as getting back to Julian, wherever he was. It had never occurred to her to doubt that she would find him waiting….

There were steps in the upper hall outside her open door—Mammy’s ponderous tread, followed by Sue’s light feet. Lying with her eyes closed, she knew that they were looking in at her from the threshold.

“Drapped off,” said Mammy in her hoarse stage-whisper.

“I do hope it wasn’t too much for her,” Sue murmured. “I hope she won’t be tired tomorrow.”

“If everybody will stop whispering and put out the lamp,” said Gran clearly from the bed, “I would like to go to sleep.”

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